unlikely places.
“I’m interested in the water main break, back on the twentieth and twenty-first of March.” He felt impatient. He’d come down here on nothing but a hunch. Nine out of ten times, such spontaneity proved a mistake.
“What a mess.” Iberson appeared suddenly uneasy, and Boldt wondered why.
“The possibility, if any, that a person could gain access to the Underground from inside the tunnels,” Boldt continued.
Iberson look confused by that suggestion. For impact, Boldt returned to his original question. “I’m investigating the drowning of a city worker. Pinpointing the source of the flooding may help us out some.”
Iberson appeared somewhat relieved.
Boldt explained, “The EMTs and Fire Rescue who hauled him out reported being inside an area that sounds to us like a part of the old Underground. Access to that area might solve some of the questions surrounding the worker’s death.”
“I got no problem with that whatsoever. You want to look at my tunnel, it’s yours. But I don’t know nothing about no underground city, and if you want to see where we flooded, we’ll have to walk it, and it’s tight in those tunnels.” He pointed to where the station’s expanse condensed to the mouths of two concrete tunnels that each carried one-way bus traffic.
“So we’ll walk it,” Boldt answered.
“Okay, but I gotta put you in an orange vest and hard hat.”
“I can live with that.”
Ten minutes later, Iberson led Boldt up the left tunnel, walking against the direction of bus traffic. They both wore Day-Glo orange vests and yellow hard hats.
The transportation department used a good number of double buses joined in the center by an accordion. Nicknamed dragons-because the second of the two sections was “dragging” behind the first-they stretched some fifty feet stem to stern and were hated by all motorists.
“If I tell you it’s a dragon coming,” Iberson warned, “you put your back against the wall and keep your toes behind the white line. Them tail sections tend to wander a little, so don’t trust what you see.”
Passing a gray door marked EMERGENCY EXIT-ALARM WILL SOUND, Boldt asked about the exits.
Iberson explained, “EERs,” pronouncing it “Ears.” “Emergency Evacuation Routes. Two per block, in both tunnels.”
“Where do they come out up top?” Boldt asked.
“Most are spiral staircases leading up to trapdoors in the sidewalks.”
Boldt had walked Third Avenue for years and never paid attention to the existence of the trapdoors. “What trapdoors?”
“They look like metal plates up there. Granted, a couple of the EERs connect through to adjacent buildings, but most head straight to the surface, swear to God.”
“Talk to me about the ones that connect through buildings.”
It occurred to Boldt these buildings might be candidates on Babcock’s list.
“Listen, with all due respect, I keep the tunnels lit and drained and the ventilation system working. I don’t know all that much about the EERs.”
There wasn’t much of anything to see. A bus approached, and Boldt pressed his back to the curved concrete. It swept past, sucking his tie from under the vest. Iberson never broke stride.
“I’d like a complete copy of the original construction plans,”
Boldt said, “including the ventilation and drainage systems.”
Iberson stopped walking and waited for Boldt to catch up. “I didn’t build them, Detective, but I can see what I can do for you.” It was lieutenant, not detective, but Boldt didn’t correct the man. Iberson pointed out two drains in the roadbed. “This is where we first saw problems. Normal drainage is no problem, and we have pumps that kick in at a certain volume, but once that water main broke, we couldn’t keep up. We had two feet down here before we knew it. Enough for the buses to hydro-plane, so we closed down. It was a bitch. The overflow had breached the ventilation ducting. It wasn’t the drains backing up, which is what we first thought-that our pumps had failed.”
He pointed to a massive grill installed high on the cement wall.
“Don’t ask me how, because we still haven’t figured it out, but this baby was basically a waterfall.”
Boldt said, “That other emergency door we passed. That would be more like the middle of the block?”
“A little north of center.”
“I’d like a look at it.” Boldt clarified, “Inside it.”
Iberson motioned Boldt back well before a dragon rushed past, wind and dust kicking up behind it. He said, “Sure thing.”
They walked a distance in silence. By this time Boldt’s thoughts were sparking as he assembled a possible explanation for both the missing women and what Iberson had been telling him. He explained as if he absolutely knew this to be fact, “Your ventilation duct penetrates the original retaining wall, constructed to enclose what once were street-level storefronts. When the water main broke, it flooded that area deep enough that your vent went underwater, creating your waterfall and flooding your tunnel.”
They reached the door. It was marked 19.
Boldt asked, “This is which kind, spiral stairs and trapdoor, or building access?”
Iberson shrugged. He didn’t have a clue. “You want a look?”
“Yes.”
Iberson disarmed the door with a key and led Boldt through, saying immediately, “It’s not the trapdoor variety.”
Boldt hadn’t thought so, but he said nothing, preoccupied with trying to put himself in Chen’s shoes or even those of Hebringer and Randolf.
The floor was textured steel plate, the walls a gray metal paneling. The lights flickered on with the opening of the door.
It was a man-made hallway leading twenty feet straight ahead to another door.
“Detective?”
“Lead on.”
They walked twenty or thirty feet before climbing a short flight of steel “fire escape” steps, at the top of which yet another sign on a steel door warned of alarms. Iberson keyed this door as well and pushed it open. It accessed a basement room bearing large EXIT signs directing pedestrians up a flight of stairs to reach the surface. The room itself felt eerily similar to the bank basement Vanderhorst had shown Boldt. If Iberson had his directions correct, then it even seemed possible this room shared a wall with the bank. The basement smelled of fresh paint and mildew. Boldt could hear the rumble of the overhead street traffic for the first time, a sound absent in the bus tunnel.
Iberson said, “Most all of the basement accesses I’ve seen look about like this. Basically nothing in them but a few signs directing traffic.”
Boldt turned and studied the wall the door had led through.
It, too, showed evidence of former windows having been bricked up. The hallway they had passed through connected this wall to the bus tunnel.
Boldt stood there for a few seconds, all else tuned out. He put Hebringer and Randolf into this space-a transcendental moment when he experienced an actual image of a man dragging an unconscious woman by the arms. It was a dreamy, jagged image, not born of anything that had happened here, but his own creation. He knew this perfectly well, and yet he went with it, allowing himself the luxury of a vivid imagination. The man had the woman by both wrists. Her hair cascaded to the floor.
Her blouse ripped, her bra pulled down exposing her right breast, her head hung to the side, lifeless. The killer pulled the gray door open, only to have Boldt find his own left hand on the cool steel metal. The killer looked back at him, but before Boldt could see the face, it melted, along with the man himself.
Susan Hebringer lay on the floor of the man-made hallway connecting the basement to the tunnel. Her eyes popped open, and she looked directly at Boldt. Her face and body changed to that of Chen, the city street worker. Chen had been clubbed on the back of the head and was bleeding. Then he, too, was gone.
“Did you hear anything I just said?” Iberson asked.
Boldt lifted a finger for silence. He studied the door as would any SID tech, running his fingers along its edge,
